This is my favorite quote from the Velveteen Rabbit; I feel like this story can give anyone a little bit of perspective and hope, two concepts that we were able to grasp as children but that have slipped increasingly away over the years.

-- "What is real?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." --

I stumbled upon this quote from a speech given to me by the director of School Year Abroad, Nelson Chase, at the Boston Airport the day I was to leave for Spain. It gave me a little hope that, someday, I can become totally real. In the past few months that I've been in Zaragoza, I've learned not to break easily, or to have to be carefully kept, but to be real, strong, and confident.